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'Chupacabras' Again?

hedgewizard1

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COLEMAN, Texas -- A Texas farmer may have found what some would call a "chupacabra," a legendary animal known for sucking the blood out of goats.

Reggie Lagow set a trap last week after a number of his chickens and turkeys were killed.

What he found in his trap was a mix between a hairless dog, a rat and a kangaroo.

The mystery animal has been sent to Texas Parks and Wildlife in hopes of determining what it is.

From: http://www.click2houston.com/news/4895017/detail.html

It's amazing that after all this time, people can't tell the difference between a mangy canid, and something unknown.
 
Actully, the mange thing might not be the right explanation for this doggish beast.
I thought that it might be myself untill Jon Downes pointed out to me that mange dose not turn skin blue, but yellowy and red.
What I think it may be is a fungal infection of another kind, possibly algal as they do live in a swamp but that's just a guess. At the very least this is quite a rare, possibly unique, form of fungal infection (how many other bald blue animals have you heard of?).
Dogs with advanced mange are not known for their athletic prowess or hunting skils either, so where as i think this may be a wild caninie affected by a fungal infection, its not mange, but something that can produce hair loss and changes the colour of the skin possibly by coating it.
 
Sorry, but Jon Downes isn't a very good judge of canines. His surprise at finding a "saggital crest" on a dog skull is appalling. Most dogs have a crest on the skull, some being very prominent.

I've dealth with dozens of mange victims, and I've never seen a yellow one. Reddish/bluish/greyish is a fair general description.

These are not necessarily dogs. The Coleman animal looks more like a fox, judging fro the position, size, and shape of the ears and legnth of the tail. hard to tell from pictures.

I think these reports owe more the August silly season than any supernatural cause.
 
This is the picture in question, for those who didn't find the slideshow:

4894992.jpg
 
No probs

To be honest, the shape of the head alone says fox to me.
 
Aww, it's actually kind of cute.

Interesting to see the results of a DNA test on it, if they carry one out...
 
Raya_Kaiserin said:
Aww, it's actually kind of cute.

Interesting to see the results of a DNA test on it, if they carry one out...

Agreed on both counts. It makes me feel sad to see it lying there dead like that, considering it looks like nothing more than an emaciated, diseased dog or related animal.. Could be wrong though. Who knows. It's pretty bizarre looking but it looks too much like a dog/fox for my tastes.
 
Given the location (western Texas), and the size of the ears, I would guess it's a Kit or Swift Fox. Hard to measure size, though. Here are a couple pics of Swift foxes. The first illustrates the relative size of the ears. The second shows the length of the tail relative to body length.
kit1.jpg


swift2.jpg
 
A message from the Onion on the subject:

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/40312

The Only Thing We Have To Fear Is The Chupacabra

By Vicente Fox
President of Mexico
September 7, 2005 | Issue 41•36

Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to serve as president of the great nation of Mexico. For nearly 200 years, our people have withstood the onslaughts of man and nature. We have withstood attack from without and attack from within. We have withstood the wars of faith, and the creeping despair of faith's absence. We have faced famine, pestilence, and poverty, and time and time again, we have succeeded, for running in our blood is the hearty stock of our Mayan and Aztec ancestors. My fellow Mexicanos, we can stand certain in the belief that we shall prevail over the trials of today. Except insofar as the Chupacabra is concerned.

Forty-seven million of our citizens are poor, with 17 million unable to afford the basic essentials of day-to-day existence. Sadly, these facts are familiar to us not only as statistics, but as real people: our mothers, our fathers, our children, and our cousins. We have climbed far since the peso crashed 10 years ago, but we must unite if we are to climb further. And as we are climbing, we must constantly look over our shoulders for the forked tongue and scaly, spiny hide of the Chupacabra.

People of Mexico, our cities have fallen under siege by thieves and murderers, but we stand together against lawlessness. The criminals and the gangs will not win! The Chupacabra, on the other hand, might. For, although hardened criminals cannot hop over trees to attack their prey, rumor has it the Chupacabra can.

Barricade yourselves in your homes and hope that this abominable creature gorges itself only on our livestock, and does not need to slake its thirst for blood on our children and our elderly. Yes, I'm afraid such a possibility is very real.

We are acting forcefully to break the grip that drug cartels have over this country, finding the supplies at their source and eradicating them. We have dispatched the army to fight the drug gangs that have run rampant in Nuevo Laredo. You can go to sleep secure in the knowledge that Mexico is working harder than ever to stop these gangsters from poisoning our children. Or, you could, were it not for the penetrating, red-eyed gaze of the goat-sucking Chupacabra.

We cannot know for sure whether the Chupacapra is an outer-space alien or some kind of feral dog-lizard hybrid. All we can know is that it should strike terror into the hearts of every man, woman, and child in Mexico. This is the only sensible response.

We have overcome the corruption in our government-housing program, and we have increased the number of homes owned by Mexico's workers, but there is more work to be done. Many of our citizens still live in tin shacks with dirt floors, vermin-infested walls, and no basic plumbing. For those who live in such conditions, I warn you: The Chupacabra will make quick work of such flimsy shelter. Then, he is likely to devour you.

The Chupacabra may be lurking among us this very minute. Even if all of Mexico pulls together and keeps a fearful eye out for this loathsome beast, it is unlikely that we will evade its deadly pounce.

Wait—did you hear something? Perhaps not. But perhaps ... Run! Run now! Run home and cower in your beds, and pray that the Chupacabra will not rip out your throat!
 
lol @ the onion...

why is the chupacabra suddenly a hairless dog/fox/whatever? until about a year ago, chupa was supposed to be a bipedal thing with big glowing eyes and spines down its back... most pictures/descriptions of it resembled something a bit like a cross between that poison spitting dinosaur from Jurassic Park and Sonic the Hedgehog... how does that translate to a quadrupedal thing that, apart from being hairless and a strange colour, looks like a normal fox/coyote/dog?
 
Part of the problem is that "experts" like Linda Moulton Howe keep pushing this junk. Personally, she lost credibly with me many years ago. But her current support of these mangy canids as the "chupacabras" should be rapidly eroding her credibility with just about everyone.
 
nataraja said:
until about a year ago, chupa was supposed to be a bipedal thing with big glowing eyes and spines down its back..
Damn right! There's a splendid 'artist's impression' of one in my copy of Tim Good's Alien Base and it sure as hell doesn't look like a bald fox!
 
nataraja said:
why is the chupacabra suddenly a hairless dog/fox/whatever?

The basic answer to that is it's not.

The problem is however that Chupacabras has become a catch all term in the US media (and also in south America) to mean any strange animal that isn't bigfoot it seams :roll:

In Jon Downes's book "Only Fools and Goatsuckers" Jon interveiws one fellow in Florida who claims to have shot a chupacabra but when the guy's brother arrives he says "Are you telling them all about the panther you shot Osvaldo?". The Florida panther is rare, yes, but hardly a chupacabra. Neither are these dogs dispite how apparently rare the fungal condition they have is.
 
The condition appears to be mange, and it is anything but rare. There may be opportunisitc fungal infections as well. My question is why hasn't someone taken one to a vet for a skin scrape (to determine just what the problem is), and then to a university for a DNA comparison.

There are a number of people going off half-cocked when the physical evidence is right there. Just get teh carcasses to a lab.
 
a form of mange that dosen't leave scabs or sores and dosen't make the poor thing dam near itch to death is rare in my opinion though, thats why i think this is a rare fungal skin complaint rather than mange.

I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this Hedge, however if skin scrapeings are taken and it turns out to be mange I promise to post on this thread in an eat my words manner :)
 
Just to add to the previous two suggestions, hairloss in canines can also be attributed to a hormonal imbalance or in older animals a lack of estrogen
 
Another of the canines with the strange skin complaint (that is not mange (it's a fungal thing)) that keep getting called chubacabra for some bizzare reason has been shot in texas:

Brothers Shoot Mystery Animal in East Texas
LAST UPDATE: 1/17/2006 4:38:02 PM
Posted By: CyberBob
This story is available on your cell phone at mobile.woai.com.
Watch this story...


Another strange dog-like creature has been found in the East Texas woods. The animal bares a striking resemblance to so-called Elmendorf Beast (aka Chupacabra).

Over the weekend, two brothers out hunting shot it and killed a mysterious animal with leathery skin, long teeth, and hind legs longer than its front legs.

Kolby Russell told KLTV in Tyler-Longview that this wasn’t his first run in with the creature. "I had chased it a couple times earlier, about a month ago, and my friends didn't believe me, I finally showed them and they did."

"I've seen mange before, and he has a body kind of built like a coyote -- but he's real skinny," says Kolby’s brother Coty told KLTV.

The Russell family sent photos to the county animal control department to see if they want to examine it.


http://www.woai.com/news/local/story.as ... 54BD92A0F9
 
I'm not exactly the foremost expert on chubacabra, but are they supposed to have wings and be larger? I dont know how a farmer could honestly beleive that these dogs with fungus are the chubacabra.
 
Well, it seems the chupacabra has undergone some changes. It was at one point described as some dinosaur raptor like creature, and later as a more bipedal wolf like one. I think it was mentioned to have some outgrowths on it's back but not sure they were considered wings.
All in all, there doesn't seem to be that much reason to consider the Elmendorf creature to be chupacabras.
 
hedgewizard1 said:
"It's amazing that after all this time, people can't tell the difference between a mangy canid, and something unknown."

What I find equally amazing is that we not only seem to be dealing with a WHOLLY NEW TYPE of mange, but one in which naturalists, zoologists and veternarians don't seem to have the SLIGHTEST interest in identifying or typing.

With traditional manges, by the time an animal is one-quarter covered it is severely off-feed, by the time it is one-half covered it is unable to consume anything more solid than than water (leading to bloating or even internal drowning), and by the time it is three-quarters covered it is DEAD.

Yet the Texas animals have been stem-to-stern mange, so much so that EARS have broken off, and yet they are still EATING normally!

This layman finds that mystery enough in itself, but apparently nobody else is even interested. Since a mange which can infect coyotes and foxes can also strike the family dog, you'd THINK that at least veternarians would be concerned.
 
Xanatico said:
"Well, it seems the chupacabra has undergone some changes. It was at one point described as some dinosaur raptor like creature, and later as a more bipedal wolf like one. I think it was mentioned to have some outgrowths on its back but not sure they were considered wings."

In the hundreds of reports of putative chupacabras I've read and filed, plus dozens of artists' sketches, it's been described as avian (both flying and non-flying), reptilian and mammalian, bi-pedal and quadrupedal. About the only thing I've not yet seen is six- or eight-legged, but I assume that "insectoid chupas" reports will come sooner or later.

Because of this, it is not possible to dismiss the Texas canids as chupacabras on purely morphological grounds, for the simple reason that we've established no consistent chupa morphology.
 
But Let's at Least Try This....

But let's at least try this - MIGHT a mangey canid, no longer able to eat solid food, but still able to DRINK, kill its natural prey animals in order to DRINK THEIR BLOOD?

If that's indeed the case the question is no longer "are these mangey animals chupacabras?" so much as "are (all) chupacabras just mangey canids?"

And this may conceivably throw new light on the entire vampire legend.
 
I think I mentioned it before, either in this thread or another one that chupacabra seems to have become a catch all term in the US media in paticular for any strange creature of a certain size range.

The blue swamp dogs do not have the apearence of chupacabras in the more traditional sense but are certinly odd I don't know about blue skinless dogs being reported before theses fellows in texas came to light a few years ago, be interesting if anyone can find earlier examples than from other places.
 
another article on the blue dogs:

Expert Identify Mysterious East Texas Animal

1/20/06-

Wildlife experts say they are sure the mysterious animal killed in Angelina County this week, is a common species. It's conjured up the wildest and worst fears of people, but a hairless animal may be very explainable. Dr. Billy Higginbotham with the Texas A & M Research Center in Overton says we're probably dealing with something we're very familiar with.

"This occurrence crops up from year to year , its not common but it does, its either a coyote or a feral dog or occasionally it could be a feral dog-coyote hybrid with sarcoptic mange, a disease" he says.

Researchers have even caught glimpses of hairless coyotes on motion sensor cameras used documenting wildlife. But others are not convinced, thinking it to be the mythical "Chupacabra" a bloodthirsty predator of Mexican lore. Hundreds have called and e-mailed with their own explanations of what the animals is, calling it a "New Jersey devil", a kangaroo dog, even an ancient sphinx.

"People enjoy summarizing what it might be" says Higginbotham.

But if it's a hybrid or new species, that presents another concern by health officials.

"Lets say that they did find out that yes you do have a new species in the area from an animal control standpoint the first thing that we would want to know is does this creature possible carry rabies" said Kevin Cummings of the Longview Environmental Health Department.

But Higginbotham remains confident.

"We don't have a new species on the loose in East Texas" he says.

Higginbotham says if you should see one of these "hairless coyotes", you should not be alarmed. Just notify the Parks and Wildlife Department in your area. Bob Hallmark reporting.

http://www.kltv.com/Global/story.asp?S=4390885&nav=1TjD
 
Hairless coyote? With short forelegs and tusks? Right...
 
"[A] hairless animal MAY be very explainable. Dr. Billy Higginbotham with the Texas A & M Research Center in Overton says we're PROBABLY dealing with something we're very familiar with.

"'ts EITHER a coyote OR a feral dog OR occasionally it COULD BE a feral dog-coyote hybrid with sarcoptic mange, a disease,' he says." (emphasis added, of course)

MAY....PROBABLY....EITHER/OR....COULD BE.

Now THERE'S state-of-the-art HARD SCIENTIFIC EVIDENCE for you!

Just think, within two or three additional generations we're going to come up with something called DNA analysis which will solve all these identifications problems once and for all.
 
Whitley Strieber

By the way, when the Elmendorff Beast was killed in Texas around 18 months ago UFOlogist Whitley Strieber obtained hair and flesh samples for which he arranged a private DNA analysis. At least that was the report across several Paranormal websites.

Alas, those findings, assuming that the tests were actually performed, seem to have entered into the Great Black Void of promisied but missing DNA results.
 
oll_lewis said:
"I think I mentioned it before, either in this thread or another one that chupacabra seems to have become a catch all term in the US media in paticular for any strange creature of a certain size range."

But not just the U. S. Argentine press reports seem to suggest that almost any injured, mutilated or partially-devoured cow, chicken, rabbit, pet dog or housecat discovered there immediately becomes a victim of the chupacabras.
 
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